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3 Stray Dogs Prowl, and Unnerve, a Queens Neighborhood

As urban perils go, one does not often hear about an entire city neighborhood being terrorized by wild dogs.

But three dogs that were roaming Kew Gardens Hills in central Queens for the past month kept some residents from leaving their homes and frightened a public elementary school, according to residents and the local city councilman, James F. Gennaro.

To hear him tell it, the community was transformed into something reminiscent of a Stephen King novel.

The capture of the dogs -- midsize mixed breeds, two black and one dark tan, all lacking tags and collars -- was finally completed this week.

"It's a big relief to students, teachers and the entire community," Mr. Gennaro said. "Once you get groups of dogs menacing people day after day, I just had to get them off the street." He said he had complained to city officials.

He said he learned of the dogs in January when his office also received more than 20 calls. Then the principal of Public School 165 and its PTA president told him that the dogs had been seen around the school before classes started many mornings.

"They knocked down and attacked a child," Mr. Gennaro said. "They attacked two staffers, and at times teachers were afraid to get out of their cars because the dogs surrounded them, barking and jumping up on the vehicles."

There were no real injuries, he said.

But the dogs rattled residents in this community of single-family homes, sprawling garden apartments and aging public housing projects.

Paula Frankel, 62, a teacher who lives in the area, said: "In my 32 years living here, I had never seen stray dogs before this.

"They were running together and you could see they were wild. I just tried not to look at them, but I was scared because I had to go to work."

Their appetite may have proved to be their undoing. The first dog was captured last week in a trap baited with dog food, and on Tuesday the remaining two dogs were surrounded by six police officers and two animal control officials. One was caught in a trap, and another was subdued by a tranquilizer dart fired by a police officer from the Emergency Service Unit.

Mike Pastore, manager of field operations at Animal Care and Control, a nonprofit group contracted by the city's Department of Health that caught the dogs, said it had been hard to capture the dogs.

He described the capture: "They did not look like they were looking to jump the first human being they saw, but I tried to lasso them. It was a difficult task because there was a lot of slush and ice and several hundred kids and lots of traffic. The dogs kept dipping into the housing complexes and popping out the other side."

The next decision seems to be what should happen to the dogs, which are being held at the center's Brooklyn shelter in East New York.

Some local residents call the dogs dangerous and say they should be killed, but Mr. Pastore said that in a preliminary test, the dogs seemed only slightly aggressive, which could have been because they were still punchy from being captured.

"I'm not saying they're our No. 1 dogs for adoption, but we're not going to immediately put them to sleep," he said.

"In a couple days, we'll test them again, and if they don't pass adoption guidelines, we'll put them down, depending upon what space we have to keep them. That's the reality of this business."

The dogs will not automatically be killed because no one has come forward with a documented case that the dogs attacked them. "You can't sign a death sentence based purely on an anecdotal story about possible attacks," Mr. Pastore said.

He said the dogs were probably abandoned but did not match the hundreds of lost-dog descriptions he keeps on record.

The dogs managed to elude animal control workers and police for weeks and they were likely living on scraps and possibly sleeping in a local construction site, Mr. Pastore said.

"There are dogs that want to dominate you, and dogs who want to be dominated," he said. "These are not dominant dogs. They are not considered aggressive. They were scared and shaking."